Two New Thought Experiments for the Ethics Classroom

1. The Callous Terrorist: a dangerous terrorist is on the loose. He tried to bomb your government’s headquarters. Fortunately he failed. However, he has announced that he would try again until he succeeded. Now the police have got a lead on his whereabouts. It appears that he is hiding amongst the crowd in a busy marketplace. The police come to the conclusion that their best chance of taking out the terrorist is to machine-gun the crowd. It is either that or risk letting the terrorist escape. They decide to shoot, killing everyone in the process, including the terrorist. When questioned after the shooting, police say they had had no intention of killing all those people, but that unfortunately the terrorist had left them no choice, so that all responsibility for the incident lies solely with the terrorist who callously chose to hide amongst the crowd. 

Questions for discussion:

Who is responsible for the deaths of the people shot by the police?

Was it morally acceptable for the police to shoot into the crowd?

Is there a morally relevant difference between the way the police have acted in this scenario and the way Israel is acting in Gaza? If yes, what is it?

2. The School Burning: after I took away your house and your livelihood, you are determined to take back what is yours, so you threaten me and make several unsuccessful attempts on my life. When I finally decide to eliminate the threat and get rid of you for good, you hide in a school, which you are hoping I won’t dare attack. However, it turns out that in this you are mistaken. I burn down the school. You narrowly escape with your life, but all the children in the school die. I say that this wasn’t my fault and that you alone are to blame for this. I was, after all, only defending myself, and you should have known that I would do whatever it takes to stop you.

Questions for discussion:

Who is responsible for the deaths of the children in the school?

Was it morally acceptable for me to burn down the school?

Is there a morally relevant difference between the way I have acted in this scenario and the way Israel is acting in Gaza? If yes, what is it?

Nothing Justifies the Mass Murder of Civilians

Israel is at it again: killing unarmed and defenceless Palestinians en masse. No matter where they go, an Israeli rocket may always find them. The bombardment is indiscriminate. There is no safe haven for anyone in Gaza. More than 700 Palestinian civilians have been killed during the past few weeks, most of them women and children, compared to two (!) Israeli civilians. 

Given these numbers, it is utterly ludicrous when Israeli politicians brazenly claim that they have no choice, that they are just defending their own people against Hamas terrorists, who, regrettably and “demonically”, now use their own population as “human shields” and try to get international support for their cause by piling up lots of “telegenically dead” Palestinians. In all seriousness Israel’s bombardment of Gaza is styled as a “war between good and evil” (Daniel Abraham, writing in Israel’s leading newspaper Haaretz, July 24^th), which of course leaves no room for negotiation. You cannot, and more importantly should not, negotiate with the devil. A compromise is out of the question. The good must prevail and evil needs to be eradicated, wiped out completely, no matter what the costs are. 

Whoever doubts that interpretation, whoever dares criticize Israel’s actions, can only be an “Israel-hater” and “anti-Semite”. How convenient that must be: always to be able to remind the world of the Holocaust, to claim a permanent victim status that gives you the licence to do whatever you damn well please. It’s the oldest defence in the world, which throughout history has helped to justify countless wars and mass killings. The Nazis also claimed that they were only defending themselves when they started killing Jews. And that it was necessary to save the world from a great evil. Not that any of this is even remotely convincing. There is always a choice, and nothing can justify the mass murder of civilians. Yes, Hamas is attacking Israel, but with very limited success. Yes, they may well want to see Israel destroyed, but that is quite understandable given how Israel has treated the Palestinians in the land they have occupied for nearly 50 years now. No matter what they say, Israel is not the victim in this conflict. If you rob a people of their freedom, if you trample on their rights and deny them a life in dignity, then it is no wonder that they fight back in an attempt to regain what has been taken away from them. 

Benjamin Netanyahu and his cronies in the Israeli government are war criminals, not only because they violate international conventions that forbid targeting civilians, but because they don’t give a damn how many people die as long as they are not Israelis. Their actions are thoroughly despicable.  

Israel's Moral Choice

Israel has stopped bombing Gaza. For now. Yet the agreed truce is not likely to last very long. There is too much hatred on both sides. In just a week of bombing more than 150 Palestinians were killed. The bombing was meant to be a response to the more than a thousand rocket attacks that Hamas launched on Israel. During those attacks five Israelis were killed. Five too many certainly, but it still doesn't seem to justify the killing of 150 Palestinians, the majority of which were civilians, including many women and children. It all seems, to the say the very least, disproportionate, and not exactly in accordance with the lex talionis, which both demands and permits taking an eye for an eye, but no more than an eye. Instead, Israel thought it was okay to take 30 eyes for one eye. This is a bit as if I took revenge on my neighbour for kicking my dog by killing him, his family and all his relatives and friends. So how can anyone think that this is justified?

When I listen to Israeli officials (as for instance the Israeli ambassador to the UK), the impression I get is that there are two (localised) moral principles that they assume to be true. The first is that the life of an Israeli is worth much more (given the numbers, at least thirty times as much) than the life of a Palestinian. So if we were discussing a trolley problem in an Israelian school to test the students' moral intuitions we might have to specify whether those about to be killed are Palestinians or Israelis. Would you push the fat man over the bridge to save 30 people on the track from the oncoming train? Not if the fat man were an Israeli and the 30 on the track Palestinian. So how many Palestians would there have to be on the track in order to justify the sacrifice of that one Israeli? 100? 500? Or would no number be high enough? Discuss.

The second moral principle that allegedly justifies the disproportionate mass killing of Palestinian children is that if you are provoked to an action, you carry no responsibility whatsoever for the consequences. If Hamas leaders choose to hide themselves in populated areas, then it is their fault, and their fault alone, if a lot of civilians die during Israelian counter attacks. It is thus not Israel that kills those people, but Hamas. In a way they are killing themselves. It is like pushing a button that causes an explosion: it would be ridiculous to hold the button responsible for the resulting deaths, especially if you are the one who pushed it. So the Palestians pushed the button that started the Israelian bombardment. In other words, Israel, in their own perception, had no agency in the matter. They didn't act, they reacted. This strikes me as a very curious and - I might as well say it - cowardly attitude. It is as if I, after killing my neighbour and his family for kicking my dog, justified my action by saying "He started it!" implying that I had no choice, that I wasn't free to do otherwise, that I was merely a means to his death, which ultimately he brought on himself.

But even though it may be true that the other is partly to blame for what happened insofar as his actions are part of the causal chain that eventually led to his death, I certainly am responsible for how I chose to respond. It is I and nobody else who decided what to do. I did have a choice. And so did Israel.